Archive for the ‘marketing’ tag

Almost as soon as I began building my 1931 Ford speedster, I began thinking about what color I would paint it. Color is important. Arguably, it’s the first aspect people register when they see something, even before they process the shape of the thing or make the mental leap to what it is: Think Coral snake or Monarch butterfly. Color communicates information on the level of “felt” rather than “thought,” and it’s not limited to sending coarse messages like “danger” or “food;” it can send subtler sensations too. Personally, I’ve been hung up on whether I want my speedster to feel rough-and-tumble racy, or fast but classy.

Getting mixed in with my thoughts are echoes of the lamentations often expressed by many here in the home office that automotive coloring has become safe, salable, and therefore boring. (This said, I still think that few colors show off a vehicle’s sculpting better than silver.) Add to this a recent conversation with a non-car person who was under the impression that all prewar cars were the color of hearses, a belief probably brought about by only being able to see the period through the lens of black-and-white photos and Henry Ford’s 1909 proclamation that customers could buy his cars in any color so long as it was black.

This got me looking into color choices available on cars in 1923 (courtesy of No. 8 of Floyd Clymer’s indispensable scrapbooks), where I quickly noticed that, far from being monochromatic, the most common offerings of colors were various shades of blue, which was available on at least 18 makes, and various hues of maroon, which could be had on at least 11.

The next most prevalent paint color? It was “optional.” That’s right, on no fewer than nine different cars, the buyer could actually choose ANY color he or she wanted. From there, the order of frequency ran down through green, black, brown, yellow and red. A veritable kaleidoscope of automotive candy coating!

Image courtesy of Axalta Coating Systems.

At last year’s SEMA show, Axalta – a global provider of paints and powdercoating – released a report of trends in automotive coloring that reaches back six decades, to 1953. The chart provided in this report would’ve made my Qualitative Display of Quantitative Information professor back in college jump up and down with glee; it very quickly communicates trends in the top-selling automotive colors via the banded car graphic keyed to timelines below it for the markets in North America, Asia Pacific, Europe and South America.

Immediately clear is that my coworkers are correct: Car colors are washing out. What’s more, nowhere else in time has an unvaried trend lasted longer than the period beginning after 1999 – the last year where the top five colors were distinctively different from one another. Since then, a formula appears to have been worked out, fully coming into play in 2010. From then until now, the top five colors sold (in descending order of frequency) are white, black, silver, gray and red.

Prior to the last decade or so, cars were indeed far more colorful. From at least as early as 1953 up until 1995, some shade of blue had always ranked in the top five, and for most of that span of time, so did brown and red. It’s likely that this was the case all the way back to the beginning of the motor age, as we saw in the data I presented from 1923 and in the 1915 chartreuse Buick example at the head of this article. For a closer look at the colors of 1975, check out Dan Strohl’s blog post here.

If it is as Oscar Wilde wrote, that “Mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and un-allied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways,” then what – in our time when we personalize even our cellphones and walking canes – is the color of our cars saying?

On my desk is an old tin box, an orange Westinghouse Mazda Lamp car kit that I keep paperclips in. A couple weeks ago, our editor-in-chief, Terry McGean, picked it up, and turning it over in his hands, wondered aloud if there were any connection between that Mazda and the Japanese car manufacturer. Though the Mazda trademark had appeared on automotive applications as well as in home and industrial lighting, I doubted there was any relation, but I didn’t know for sure.

And that was all it took. Because I believe that part of the Hemmings mission is to present the highest quality information on all things automotive – and because I’m an inveterate researcher – I dove in. What I found was surprising and informative.

Quickly, I confirmed with an Internet search that the two Mazdas were never officially connected, though several sites point out that both took inspiration for their name from the same intriguing source: Ahura-Mazdā, the fifth century BCE Zoroastrian god.

Later in my research, I would come to believe that Mazda Motor Corporation, which for much of its existence had been called Toyo Kogyo Co., Ltd., had likely gotten the initial idea for its current name from the General Electric light bulbs bearing the trademark that saturated Japan up until just before World War II.

For the car company, the familiarity of the name with potential buyers would have seemed beneficial, and the allusion to the Zoroastrian god of the Middle East would strike a fitting and positive chord in the global marketplace, as a bridge between the peoples of the two hemispheres. It was also a happy coincidence that “Mazda” is a close transcription of the family name of its venerated founder, Jujiro Matsuda.